Introduction to Carlos Fuentes:

Contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Julio Cortazar

The Death of Artemio Cruz

Carlos Fuentes is a Mexican novelist and one of the best-known living essayists and novelists in the Spanish-speaking world. Together with Borges and Cortazar, he has influenced the generation of post-Boom writers that have been studied in these weekly columns. Fuentes made his international breakthrough with The Death of Artemio Cruz in 1962. Major themes in Fuentes's work are the limitless power of fantasy, the dilemma of national identity, and the promise and failure of the Mexican revolution. Fuentes has been frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Fuentes's upbringing was privileged. He received a cosmopolitan education in private school and he became bilingual from an early age. At home his father made him read Mexican history, which he saw as one of crushing defeats compared with that of the United States. "I learned to imagine Mexico before I ever knew Mexico", Fuentes once said. At the age of 16 he returned there, where he attended the prestigious 'Colegio de México'. He then entered the School of Law at the National University of Mexico, receiving his LL.B. in 1948. He also studied economics at the 'Institut des Hautes Études Internationales' in Geneva. During his university years, Fuentes became a Marxist and joined the Communist Party. In 1959 he married the famous Mexican actress Rita Macedo. They had a daughter, Macedo, "dark-skinned, with large, almond-shaped eyes and prominent cheekbones," as Fuentes described her, who appeared in the last scene of Luis Buñuel's 'Exterminating Angel'.

From 1959 Fuentes devoted himself to writing. During the 1960s he lived mostly in Europe. His third major novel, 'Cambio de piel' (1967, A Change of Skin), which depicted a group of people on a journey from Mexico City to Vera Cruz, won a prestigious prize in Barcelona, Spain. However, the book was criticized as "pornographic, communistic, anti-Christian, anti-German and pro-Jewish" and censors did not allow its publication in Spain. Due to his political views Fuentes was 'persona non grata' in the United States and was forbidden to enter Puerto Rico. He protested against the Mexican government's brutal repression of the student revolution in Tlatelolco Square before the Olympic Games in 1968 and was exiled to Paris. In 1971 along with other leftist intellectuals and labor leaders he attacked the dominant 'Partido Revolucionario Institucional', or PRI. In A 'New Time For Mexico' (1994) he described President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's economic policies as "archaic, savage capitalism, concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority and waiting for the impossible miracle of trickle-down."

Carlos Fuentes

From 1974 to 1977 Fuentes served as the Mexican ambassador to France. He has been a teacher and fellow at various universities, including Columbia University, New York, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Princeton University, New Jersey, and Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has been often been paired with the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, of whom he has also written." He seemed to literally look inside himself, as if this were the only thing that counted in matters of sight," Fuentes wrote in 'Borges in Action', "seeing outside being a totally frivolous affair." Whereas Borges uses history as a basis for pure fantasy, Fuentes maintains a realistic stance on power and politics in Latin America - myths of the past and a wide range of cultural references are combined with social critique. Fuentes also uses experimental techniques familiar from the nueva novella (new novel) and postmodern fiction. In later novels Fuentes has dealt with the question of Mexican identity and its relationship to other cultures.

'The Death of Artemio Cruz' is told in the first, second, and third person. Artemio Cruz is a poor peon (peasant) and supporter of revolutionary ideals. He gains wealth and becomes a corrupt, ruthlessness business magnate, a symbol of international capitalist greed. As he lies on his deathbed, Fuentes follows his fragmented thoughts and images, wavering between past and present.

The haunting novella 'Aura' (1962) is told in the second person narrative. The reader and the fictional protagonist are united in a story which deterministically leads to change of identities. A young historian, Felipe Motero, starts to complete the memoirs of General Llorente in a strange, old house.

He falls in love with the beautiful young Aura. She is the niece of his employer, Señora Consuelo, the widow of the general. Eventually Felipe finds his reincarnated identity and Consuelo tells him that Aura is the projection of her younger self. Fuentes started to write the novel in Paris, which he has called a double city.

In the story Fuentes recreated a girl he had met as a child in Mexico and years later again in Paris: "She was another, she had been another, not she who was going to be but she who, always, was being."

Aura by Carlos Fuentes

'Terra Nostra' (1975) is concerned with the history of Spain and of South America, with the Indian Gods and with Christianity, with the birth, the passion, and the death of civilizations. It moves freely in time from ancient Rome to the apocalyptic end of the 20th century. "Time is the subject matter of all my fiction", Fuentes once said. One of the main settings is the 16th century Spain, where Philip II constructs the monastery-palace of El Escorial. 'El gringo viejo' (1985, The Old Gringo) was a love triangle drama of an American woman, Harriet Winslow, Tomás Arroyo, a general, and the American journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during Pancho Villa's revolution in 1913. "She sees, over and over, the specters of Tomás Arroyo, the moon-faced woman and the old gringo cross in her window. But they are not ghosts. They have simply mobilized their old pasts, hoping that she would do the same and join them." The book was filmed by Luis Puenzo in 1989, starring Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck.

In 'Instinto de Inez' (2001) Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, a symphony conductor, realizes at the age of 93, that the future, for him, means death but in the past are love and Inez; eternity. Like Artemio Cruz at the end of his life, Garbriel studies the choices he has made in his life. At the centre of the story is a mystic crystal seal which unites space and time.

Fuentes' ability to write short stories has been acclaimed by critics, although his short fiction has generally received less attention than his novels. Nevertheless, his overriding literary concerns are the same in both genres. He explores the issue of Mexico's national character and attempts to firmly establish the country's cultural identity. To accomplish this, he incorporates myth, legend, and history into his work, probing the past events of his homeland and the essence of modern Mexican society. His short fiction features unusual treatments of time and the use of fantastic, seemingly supernatural, events. He is also known for the ironic twists that he frequently places at the conclusion of his short narratives. It is his deft handling of this classic short story tool that has helped to establish his strong reputation as a highly influential writer.